Lost and Found
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Author's note: I am currently writing a book about adoption reunion stories. If you or someone you know would like to share an adoption reunion or search story with me, please write to lost_now_found_1@yahoo.com. All stories will be treated with empathy and respect, and all if used, all identifying information will be altered upon request. Here is part of my story:
How do you speak of loss when you have no memory of having had the lost object in the first place? Your hands are unblemished and whole, save for the ache you awake to every morning of your life, the one that whispers once something was there, and then was there no more.
I do not remember the birth of my sisters, Doe and Donna. I do not recall the day each was brought home from the hospital, captivating my imagination like colorful ribbons tied to a small surprise package. I have no recollection of the brief time that followed, our lives together, before the day when one was taken by her father, by then my mother's estranged second husband, the other by the State of California to be placed for adoption, while I, at five years old, was sent to live with various relatives and family friends until I finally ended up in Israel.
And yet, for forty-five years they have been tethered to me by love like the slight yet sturdy string attached to a kite. For forty-five years I have remained entranced by the dream of my sisters, I have memorized them with no memory. They became my home, my history, my first loss by which all other losses would come to be measured. And I went looking for them. In the blank pages of photograph albums, in the branches of our withered family tree, in the lines on my face, in the faces of strangers across a room, I sought their reflection and my own.
For years I wandered outside to gaze at the stars at night, hoping to pinpoint the parallel universes where in that very moment I was standing on a mountain, harvesting wheat in a field, dancing on the shoreline of an ocean. In each I was holding my little sisters' hands.
Until the night I found my sister Doe, actually spoke with her, I never, not once, said the word 'sister' to my mother. Ah, the unbearable lightness of being my mother's daughter. My mother gave birth to three daughters and came to forfeit each of us; she squandered her daughters like a drunk squanders his paycheck. I, the eldest, was the last to be forsaken and the first to be restored. I was her sole witness. Now, I am her accuser, I am her prosecution and her defense. I am her evidence. In turn, my mother wants to talk about the grand opening of the supermarket across town, the Channel Four weather- forecaster and his news-anchor wife. She details a new pasta recipe. She skims through the other channels, eager to point out another married newscasting couple. This is how she distances herself. And yet, I collude with her, do not fault only her, for the words numb my throat as well. What is unspoken between us? Grief, fear, anger, memory, love. Everything. For years I have been haunted by a single question about my mother's life: what exactly happened?
I searched for Doe for twenty-six years before I finally found her. I am still searching for my youngest sister, Donna. For years, hope of finding them slipped into long-ago daydreams of things that might have been and the ache in my hands became something else, a hollowness I named resignation. And whereas once, whenever someone asked if I had siblings, I would tell some part of my story, hoping against hope that the telling would lead to one of them ("Oh! I know her! Your sister is in my yoga class!") now I would simply shake my head and say, "No, I am an only child."
Then one day, while checking my email I spotted a program called 'AOL White Pages.' I'd tried before to get onto the World Wide Web but knew little about it, and with my slow modem (at the time even the word sounded like a body part or a disease) I'd had little access. 'AOL White Pages' advertised the largest database of people in America. I smirked. I could look myself up: "I am listed, therefore I am." And then it dawned on me - I could look for anyone. In that moment, I determined to edge my way onto the miracle of the Information Super Highway and ride it all the way home. How do you speak of return after years of exile? On April 14, 1998, I found my Doe on the Internet, through the White Pages of America Online.
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Three weeks after I found my sister we meet and fly together to Hawaii to spend ten days together with our mother. By the middle of the week I am still elated, but also feel a little lost. Since finding Doe I have been deluged with memories and feelings. For how many years had the loss of my family defined me? As a child, growing up in a family where neither the parents nor the siblings were my own, I developed a horrid sense of shame. When the other children in school found out I lived with a family that was not my own I was taunted with the ruthless cruelty children are capable of. I felt just on the other side of inside, always on the periphery. Even now, although I have many friends, I tend toward the solitary. I am wary of getting too close to people. I still secretly believe everyone I ever love is destined to disappear.
In my mind, putting the missing pieces of my family together is supposed to cure me of all this, give me the sense of belonging I'd craved. A few days into our visit, though, I know this is never going to happen. In fact, it's made things worse. Perhaps some wounds are just too deep, perhaps some things I will simply have to come to on my own.
Our lives have paralleled each other in certain ways, but my sister and I are also very different from each other. Doe has lived mostly in communes, often packing up her children and following the Rainbow Trail of the Grateful Dead. I, too, have always wanted to take flight and be a gypsy, but, although by some standards my life is unconventional, I have always felt some unspoken weight, perhaps the responsibility of the first-born embedded in my DNA. She is sunny and agile in her speech and thought, while I bear an invisible burden and am often shadowed by the moon.
I want to know every detail about her life, her first kiss, the pain of childbirth, her loves and losses. I also want to tell my sister about my life, I want her to know me, to bond with me around the things we share in common. But the truth is she asks me nothing and every time I begin to tell her of growing up in Israel, about my work and the places I have been, she interrupts with a story of her own. She often said, "Always remember your sister loves you," yet she didn't seem very interested in me and I couldn't understand what this phrase might mean.
My mother and my sister, though, share the same temperament, the same mannerisms, the same personality. The same laugh. Oh, that unbearable lightness. Only now it seems truly unbearable to me. Now that we're together, the three of us sitting around my mother's kitchen table, this is what I want to know: what exactly happened the day my sister was taken? I imagine the frantic patter of my tiny feet running through the house, searching the rooms, the closets, under the bed, behind the couch, in the kitchen cabinets. At first I must have thought it was a game, hide and go seek. Laughing. Then not understanding. Where is my sister? Doe?! Doe! Was I frightened? I know I must have been. I wasn't even three. What did my mother say to me, what words did she use to try to explain how or why my sister had simply vanished?
Now I can't stop myself. I want to know the details. Of course, this is not the only thing I want to talk about - I am excited and happy that we have the opportunity to do simple things, normal mother-daughter things. Shopping. Manicures. Picnics on the beach. But for once, I need to speak the consequences of our history by name. I feel I have earned this as a right. I have had a rich and fascinating life. I have become a creative woman, a loyal and generous friend. And this too: I have often lived with a depression which comes in like the tide and leaves behind the wreckage of grief, an obsession with what is but never should have been, what could have been but is not, and the searing question of why? My mother says: "I don't remember." They look at me, both of them, as though they don't know what I am talking about. They don't know why I am talking about it.
I watched my mother fall in love with my sister as I had never felt she loved me, like introducing a new lover to your best friend and watching their attraction for each other. All you can do is hold your breath and hope your worst fears do not come true. But as I watched them together I realized that all along it was only our mother my sister had hoped to find. I felt genuine pleasure in bringing to each of them the gift of the other. Frequently I was able to joke about my feelings - "so this is what sibling rivalry feels like!" But I felt an ugly jealousy as well. As a young girl, I often desperately waited for something to happen, something that would completely change me, make me into someone else, someone wittier, taller, blonder, smarter, anything other than who I was. For so much of my life I felt myself to be a stranger within my own skin. Now I felt these dreadful feelings once again. My sister spoke in Rainbow phrases, "What I do best is love people!" while I seemed to speak the strange grammar of the dead. I wanted to see the world through her eyes, to speak her language, to own it as my own. This is what I wanted more than anything: I wanted to be the one to have been found. I came to feel that my sister was my mother's truer daughter; I, the redundant child. And although I came to accept this new reality as a kind of bitter and ironic fate, I also felt that fate had been turned on its head. My mother and sister had been robbed of each other, while I, longing for a different life, a different family, would have gladly traded places. And in spite of everything that's happened since, I sometimes wonder if my mother does not secretly wish we could have. But that is one question I will never ask her to answer.
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How do you speak of loss when you have no memory of having had the lost object in the first place? And how, in turn, do you speak of loss when that which you lost was so near that you felt its life force, felt its heart beat and flutter like a sparrow in the palm of your hand?
Sometimes I think I merely conjured Doe as a dream within a dream. And I would say that this is true, that this is how it really was, save for the ache that we now share, my mother and I. Yes, we finally have come to bear witness together, to a loss that even my mother cannot forget or deny. On December 24, 1999, twenty months and ten days after I found her, Doe was diagnosed with cancer. Even before the words were spoken, I knew she was going to die.
Ah, my little sister. This was a grief that overwhelmed and shattered me. I cried for her, for myself, for our mother. I cried as I imagined myself crying in the days and weeks after our separation. And yet, I also knew that my little sister was on her own path of life and death; by grace, our lives had been allowed to cross and we were given a few rare moments in which to meet and witness each other, each in the way she best knew how. And I have been grateful. For now I am able to do what I had not been able to do before: I can remember. Here we are racing down the beach laughing, sneaking a cigarette in our mother's back yard, admiring the neighbor's son, sighing together, "Oh no, he's way too young!" Here I am holding her, breathing in her smell, softly brushing a strand of hair from her cheek. I have one hundred million times relived each and every moment we had together, sometimes with deep joy, sometimes with deep regret. But most of all, I have come to know that we are meant to live in fragile beauty, to love in the face of fear, to live in the face of death. That even as we search for reasons, life demands song.
On February 24, 2000, I recited the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning for my Jewish-born Catholic-raised Rainbow sister. Doe's last words to me were, "Always remember your sister loves you." And I believed her, and have come to know what these words might mean.
My sister was both my history and the history from which I am forever exiled; my search for her a wound that deepened even as it longed for healing. And yet, slowly, tentatively, healing draws near. Now she often comes to me in dreams at night and when we step across the threshold to gaze at the cool clear stars, we pinpoint the parallel universe where in that very moment we are standing facing each other, and with our palms pressed together, we are bowing, bowing in the wind.
love everyone feed everyone remember god tell the truth
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